Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment “This website has ads, so it’s trash” pop up in conversations. And honestly I don’t quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they’re personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.
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Indeed and people often say “if an ad is annoying I’ll never buy that product, so ads don’t work on me, also they’ve never made me click on or run out and buy something” !
However advertising is accompanied with thorough independent market research and sales numbers and companies can directly see the impact of their ad campaigns. It’s indisputable.
In the long term it’s also about brand recognition, we see a “stupid ad” today and in a year when we’re looking for that kind of thing we are more likely to choose that brand over another and we don’t know why but “this jams seems better”. The effect is proven, scary and it’s something we’re relatively helpless against. It doesn’t help that our brains sometimes register things running in the background on the TV while we’re petting the dog. Product placement in movies works like that too, if we notice it we think it’s obvious and stupid, but we still notice it and even when we don’t notice it our helpful subconscious is right there helping us remember.
Moving into even worse territory, on social media like Facebook they can profile us enough to know where we’re leaning politically and if we’re not entirely confident in our political stance they can show us ads that looks like product ads but are designed to nudge our political stance a bit to the side in the desired direction.
The effect of ads on the subconscious is scary. It’s not complete mind control but it can influence us without us noticing.
Not on social media ? No problem, they still build up shadow profiles. A Google executive once bragged at a conference that they know everything we’ve done since the first day we got on the Internet. Hyperbolic maybe but that confidence comes from somewhere.
Ads are the epitome of the enshitification of the internet. It corrupts the incentives to make anything online.
At least they’re personalized now
This is a whole other can of worms that makes it so much worse. From data harvesting to selling your information to third parties etc… It is a privacy nightmare and rather malicious in nature. This is one of the things that FOSS (Free and open-source software) tries to remedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq7NLMwynYg
Semi related, but here is a funny video about ads. It wouldn’t surprise me if this video had ads on it. I’d recommend an ad blocker.
90% of the internet has always had ads
No, it didn’t, kid.
Ad Blocking IS Cyber Security
Many people have become accustomed to life without ads. I have used adblockers in my browsers for probably the past 20 years. So the experience that you are talking about (just scrolling past them), is an experience that I don’t really know, unless I am suddenly using some other computer that belongs to a friend or something.
People have also gotten away from ads in their entertainment by subscribing to things like Netflix rather than cable.
Once you don’t have advertising shoved in your face 24/7, then suddenly being bombarded with it is incredibly offensive.
You can’t scroll some of the ads, that’s one of the problems.
There are video ads that remain on the bottom of the page regardless of what you do. Same for image ads.
I’m trying to read an article and there is distracting ads all over the page.
Ads back in 90s were subtle, I have zero problems with textual google ads in the article but videos and images that is also slowing down my experience with its large downloads?
Sites are like loading 10m of content for a 2kb text article. Come on.
When i load a page on my phone and 60% of the page is ads, then i scroll and there is another ad making 100% of my screen ads, for things i will never be into buying, it makes me not want to use that site.
Ads as a general concept are ok to me, otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money. It’s just how many ads and what type. Pop-up ads are bad, too many ads are bad, ads that are deceptive are bad. They need to be small, curated, non-intrusive, and non-deceptive.
otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money.
It’s unfortunate, but this would be a much better internet in the long run. There are other business models besides ads. Like Curiosity Stream and NebulaTV as alternatives to Youtube. People who make video content simply get paid to do it. With ads the type of content you primarily fund is outrage content and whatever gets the most clicks regardless of whether the creator cares about what they are making or not.
There would be some growing pains in an internet that isn’t driven by ads, but it would be way better.
90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business.
Nah, I’ve always hated ads, and always blocked them as soon as we had the capability.
I’m just sick of ads cluttering every damn thing I lay my eyes on.
Personally, I don’t mind ads that are not extremely obnoxious. A clickable link on the sidebar advertising something or a random picture here and there - no problemo, as they’re easy to ignore.
What I can’t stand are the extremely intrusive ones - pop-ups that obscure half of the screen with such a tiny little X in the corner that you need to click it in a pixel-perfect manner so you won’t “accidentally” open the ad itself. Ads that play music at full volume without warning. Unskippable ads in videos. Sites that greet you with “we noticed you’re using an adblocker” and just won’t let you view the actual site content. Ads that make the rest of the site lag like hell or freeze entirely. Rapidly flashing ads in neon colors that almost make you have a seizure by looking at them. Those can GTFO and if my adblocker isn’t able to / allowed to hide them, I simply won’t use the site in question anymore and that’s it.
To make an IRL comparison: I don’t mind at all if there are advertisement brochures just lying around on a counter while I’m in a mall, because I can decide on my own whether or not I want to take one of those. But if there is an employee blocking my way, screaming at the top of their lungs and slapping me across the face with said brochure, and I am not allowed to knock them out cold, then I’ll never set foot into that store again, ever.
Fun fact. There’s a dating app, can’t remember which one, where it would display a full sized ad, and if you even tried to swipe back, it would instantly load the playstore.
Sorry. Not swiping to go back. Swiping to close the app. I removed that insanely quick. Whilst still not ideal, Tinder has an ad system that shows like a users profile. But you can just swipe it away without any bullshit. Or if you like the look od it you can click or swipe on it. Take a guess which one has a significantly better user experience.
My shows have ads
My videoes have ads
My video games have ads
My language learning app…ads
My podcasts…3 mins of ads
Not just banner ads like the old days but content covering ads, noisy ads, unskippable ads, 1 of 3 ads. It’s totally out of control.
The world is made just a tiny bit worse for every ad someone forces another person to see.
I get ads may be a necessary evil if you’re using a website or service you aren’t directly paying for, but 9/10 times it’s because of how they’re implemented and behave and advertisers and large publishers are out of touch with users and never learned or they simply just don’t care.
First off, it seems that ads always have to be presented in the most obnoxious ways and this is a problem that’s almost as old as the internet. I remember going online back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d get those extremely obnoxious and seizure inducing “YOU’RE OUR 1’000’000 VISITOR” or “YOU WON A FREE IPOD” ads. Today though, ads are still as annoying or even worse to an extent since every website now insists having autoplaying videos with sound or if you’re using a phone and trying to read an article, 3/4 of the page will be taken up by an ad and you have little room to view the actual content.
Secondly, ads have been increasingly becoming a privacy issue. Advertisers want to know every little thing about us and have the ability to track us around the web. I really want advertisers especially to know as little as possible about me because they clearly can’t be trusted with data wether they keep it internally or sell it to data brokers because some of the data they’re able to collect is alarming.
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Advertising is a huge waste of societal resources.
Think about it: what’s the actual point of advertising, from the consumer’s point of view? I would argue it’s to get notified of available products, and why you might want that product.
But that’s not what advertising does 99% of the time, now. Advertising now is a collection of products that you already know exist, have probably already looked at, but now you’re getting spammed. Because they aren’t trying to educate you as a consumer - they’re trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else’s identical product.
If you look at the total GDP that goes to advertising, it’s frankly insane. It’s lost 20%. Add finance into that, and most of our GDP is centered around meta-economics rather than stuff people want/need/will use.
they’re trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else’s identical product.
That’s probably the case for a lot of products, but I don’t agree with your generalization that advertising offers nothing to the consumer and is presumably a drain on the economy.
I run a small business and see noticeable returns on advertising dollars spent vs not advertising. I run a services business and advertising makes it easier for clients to find us and makes me more money that I put back into the economy by buying lavish things like food and rent. I hate advertising and wish I didn’t have to pay Google or use social media to promote our “brand”, but the truth is I do in order to stay competitive.
The advertising I’m buying isn’t tricking or spamming anybody, it’s targeted to people that are looking for that kind of service in my area and it doesn’t misrepresent our work in any way. What it does do is get my foot through the door and increases the likelihood of them reaching out to us over the schmucks down the street that offer a similar service, but are not as good as us in terms of value, customer service and quality of work. There’s value in that for the consumer.
